Freedom from Facebook?

The #DeleteFacebook grassroots movement may seem to have stalled, but privacy and anti-monopoly advocacy groups aren't waiting for consumer pressure alone to goad Facebook into doing the right thing. Far from it, actually; they're hauling out the big guns.

From Gizmodo:

Privacy and anti-monopoly advocacy groups launched the Freedom from Facebook campaign on Monday, demanding that the Federal Trade Commission force the social media giant to break up into four separate companies. Sensing a moment of weakness, activists hope to establish stronger privacy protections and cross-platform communication.

After spending years ignoring privacy concerns and the potential for its platform to be used by bad actors, Facebook has made itself incredibly vulnerable to criticism. The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrated how it could lose control of millions of users’ data, and it has served as a tipping point for public outcry and political pressure. A coalition of groups that includes Demand Progress, Move On, Citizens Against Monopoly and the Open Markets Institute sees an opportunity.

On Monday, Freedom from Facebook launched a petition with three core demands:

1. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger should be separated into four companies that operate independently.
2. Require interoperability between competing social networks.
3. Create “strong privacy rules that empower and protect us.”

According to Axios, the petition will be accompanied a digital ad campaign that will target Facebook and Instagram users with simple messages like: “Facebook keeps violating your privacy. Break it up” and “Mark Zuckerberg has a scary amount of power. We need to take it back.” The ads will also run on platforms that aren’t run by Mark Zuckerberg, like Twitter.

I'd rather have seen U.S. lawmakers jump on this themselves, having recognized a winning issue when they saw it, but I'll take this as a consolation prize.

Ironically, it might be that Zuckerberg himself made anti-trust action more likely. Even while he was lying about being open to regulation during his testimony to Congress, he was also trying to undercut the idea of regulations by noting that "a large company like Facebook can often comply with strict rules that would be onerous for a small startup."

That might have been the killer, in more ways than one, because while it might discourage Republicans, in particular, from enacting new regulations, it also opens the door to an anti-trust action targeting Facebook specifically, which would (a) solve the Facebook problem, while (b) not harming small startups at all. In fact, breaking up Facebook might actually clear the field for smaller startups, allowing some competition and innovation in this sector of the industry again.

Facebook's position on this, naturally, is that we should pay no attention to their 2 billion users, and instead treat them like the plucky little startup that they stopped being over a decade ago:

We asked Facebook for comment regarding the campaign and a spokesperson sent us a statement that repeated talking points the company seems to be sticking with—that it’s not the social media juggernaut people think it is. The statement argues that Facebook is operating in a competitive environment in which “the average person uses eight different apps to communicate and stay connected.” This has become a standard defensive point that Facebook flacks and Zuckerberg himself are relying on. Facebook doesn’t mention that it owns the top three apps in that category and has a history of ripping off the features of the other competitors.

The fact that Freedom from Facebook kicked off on the 20th anniversary of Microsoft’s landmark antitrust fight is unlikely to be a coincidence, either:

There are ample parallels between ‘90s-era Microsoft and Facebook, including a culture that believes it’s too big to be tamed by the government and a relentless dedication to dominating competitors it can’t out-innovate. That case is generally viewed as having set the stage for companies that spurred the tremendous growth in the tech sector throughout the aughts. And many experts believe now could be time for the U.S. government to set a new example in the social media age.

Realistically, the Republicans who control Congress are probably not going to act on this unless the Trump Administration decides that Facebook are on the weeks' "enemies list," but hopefully Democrats can recognize a popular, and populist, issue with widespread and bipartisan appeal on which they can effectively campaign in the upcoming mid-term elections. Even if the U.S. can't get their act together to start the process of taking Facebook down a peg, it's possible that the EU will, simply because the rest of the world is increasingly coming to terms with a new world order in which the U.S. isn't leading anyone anywhere anymore.

A sweeping wave of Information Age "trust-busting" is unlikely to end with Facebook, of course; they're by far the worst actors, and thus the most vulnerable targets, but Alphabet, Amazon, and the Comcast/Charter-Spectrum telecom oligopoly are all potential targets as well. After a decade in which large corporations with too much power already were allowed to grow ever larger, the idea that we might just see some of that walked back is definitely a tantalizing one.